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 1921 SHORT NOTICES 149 convicts lived in the galleys. He thinks that the injustice of the incidence of the personal ' taille • has been greatly exaggerated. The personal ' taille ' had at least this advantage, that the farmers of the nobles and clergy paid it ; it was probably for this reason that the Encyclopaedia of the eighteenth century, compiled by persons of the privileged classes, attacked it so bitterly. Now, in default of adequate monographs, too often even now all dis- cussion of the finances of Vancien regime is based upon information given by the Encyclopaedia. He also says ' we know nothing ' on the disputed question whether Colbert's edicts of reform in procedure were actually carried out. Writing dramatized and literary rather than scientific history M. Boulenger has the gift of making his ' Corneillean ' men and women vivid figures. As illustrating the reaction against Rousseauism which characterizes much French writing to-day, it is perhaps worth noting that, in M. Boulenger's opinion, ' the seventeenth century knew nothing of that sensibility of which the eighteenth and nineteenth made such deplorable use.' W. D. G. In his study of The Influence of Oversea Expansion in England to 1700 (Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law. New York : Columbia University Press, 1920) Dr. James E. Gillespie has produced an interesting book. It contains a great collection of materials illustrating its subject, facts accurate and inaccurate, quotations from poets and prose writers, and generalizations of varying value. But this miscellaneous information is not properly assimilated or well ordered. The subject is a difficult one and would have tasked an experienced writer : it was a mistake to select it for a doctor's dissertation. The best way of showing the nature of the treatment is to summarize the contents. Three chapters are devoted to the effect of ' expansion ' on English society and three others to its effects on commerce, industry, and finance. Morals and religion together occupy one chapter ; thought, literature, art, and political development separate chapters. In the chapter on morals and religion, religious toleration, scepticism, and materialism are successively attributed to the influence exercised by the discovery of the New World and its colonization, and the demoralizing results of materialism are illustrated by the extravagant expenditure of early seventeenth-century Englishmen in dress, jewellery, and tobacco. Then comes a concluding section on the good results of 1 expansion ' shown in ' the newly awakened zeal for foreign missions The treatment of these various topics is too superficial to be satisfactory, and the chapter, like the book itself, lacks cohesion. As to details, the author takes his facts too lightly from second-hand authorities. On p. 20 he says * a code of laws was in force which in Cromwell's time sanctioned the execution of 3,000 persons for witchcraft alone The authority cited for this is Scharfs History of Maryland, vol. i, p. 371. The real facts are stated in Professor Wallace Notestein's admirable History of Witchcraft in England, published by the American Historical Association in 1911. About four persons seem to have been executed for witchcraft during the Protectorate, and forty or fifty during the Commonwealth. Again, in a note on p. 24, it is said that ' apparently